New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

Now its getting really interesting: In the end you have to compare pricing for a vCore (which is a thread on a cpu) with per-thread performance on AMD vs. Intel. Does anyone know a benchmark like this? Epyc Processors are most often tested on heavy parallelizable tasks and not strictly single thread tasks.

From what I've seen AMD's recent chips beat (sometimes outright destroy) Intel on multithreaded tasks, but on single-threaded tasks it's still a bit of a toss up and depends on the work load. Intel seems to still come out ahead on some heavy numeric and scientific type work loads, especially if vector instructions are used. The differences are not huge though, and AMD solidly wins on price/performance even in cases where it's a bit slower in absolute performance for single threaded work.

At this point Intel literally only makes sense if you have one of those single threaded work loads where it still excels and you absolutely must have the fastest single thread performance.

Is that with spectre/meltdown/etc protection on?

AWS patched their hosts back in 2018 which caused a huge shitstorm in terms of performance lost across various workloads..so yes.

https://blog.appoptics.com/visualizing-meltdown-aws/